Sell T-shirts Online For Free?

Yes, selling T-shirts online can be loads of fun, particularly when you don’t have to deal with inventory or manage payment for the goods. But with any type of business, nothing is always a bed of roses.

While you can design and create T-shirts with various messages for free in platforms such as Teespring, Fabrily or Zazzle, I wouldn’t be too quick to say that to sell T-shirts online free, without investing a dime, would be a breeze.

Design and Sell T-shirts Online

I started dabbling in selling T-shirts online as I thought it was fun creating something without having to have any design skills or background (trust me – I don’t have a streak of designing skill in me).

Teespring was the first I discovered, and with most online money-generating opportunities, I got excited and brainstormed on ideas as to the kind of T-shirts I wanted to promote.

These were some of my ‘pioneer’ creations …

How to Start?

Teespring, the largest platform for selling T-shirts online, manufactures and ships T-shirts from the United States. It allows for T-shirts with messages in English only.

Fabrily, on the other hand, allows for T-shirts with French, German and Italian messages, apart from English.

Zazzle is another platform that also provides opportunities to sell items such as cards, mugs, pens, besides T-shirts.

Signing up to these platforms is free. In fact, you can start designing your T-shirts and promote them as soon as you finish your sign-up. It would certainly help if you have some artistic skills as you can then design the T-shirts yourself. If not, you can always hire designers from places like Upwork to have them design the T-shirts for you. Some designers in Upwork specialise in T-shirt design and hence, are familiar with the specifications (set by Teespring, Fabrily, Zazzle) such as the number of colours allowed or the size of the design.

However, just like starting other forms of online business, going into selling T-shirts online also require that you determine the niche you want to go into. This is the first you need to look into before going into the other steps :

Identifying the niche(s)

Designing the T-shirts(s)

Determining the best marketing platform to promote the T-shirts

Testing and tweaking your designs or marketing strategies

1. Identifying Your Niche

This is the stage where you determine ‘who’ would be interested in buying your T-shirts. Some T-shirt marketers target various professions, the most popular being firefighters, nurses, accountants, engineers, dentists, teachers. Some T-shirts don’t specifically target the people working in these vocations but rather their spouses, mothers, fathers. Below is an example from Teeepring :

Apart from profession, other areas that can are commonly targeted as niches are hobbies and pets (targeting pet owners).

2. T-Shirt Design

I notice that designs that get positive response are those which are witty and done on black or dark-colored T-shirts. Below is an example of a top-selling T-shirt :

With any design, you have to be conscientious in checking that the graphics or words used in the design are free of copyright issues.

My Teespring account was temporarily suspended once as I got into trouble with one of my T-shirts related to Zumba. Silly me didn’t know then that Zumba is a trademark and I had happily used the word on a T-shirt design.

3. Selling The T-shirts

In my opinion, the best way to sell T-shirts online is by using Facebook ads. This is why I stated earlier that while designing your T-shirt can be done free if you have design software skills, marketing your T-shirts may require some investment.

I believe there are not many people who would specifically go to search engines looking to buy a particular type of T-shirt online. Therefore, using SEO to market your T-shirts may not make much sense as compared to placing ads in Facebook.

The reason why successful online T-shirt sellers often recommend Facebook as a marketing tool is that it allows you to get as targeted as possible with your audience. For instance, if you are promoting some T-shirt for teachers, you might want to target just Math teachers, instead of being too general.

In the above example, there are a number of ‘Math Teachers’ groups. If all shown above are selected, the potential reach would be too high. Having too high a number defeats the purpose of having targeted audience. To get round this, you can just select some of the groups shown so you can bring down the potential reach to beween 50,000 to 100,000.

You should also set your daily budget so that the ad will stop running once the budget is reached. For a start, you might want to set it at $5 per day. This is to allow you to monitor and determine if the campaign you are running is worth the effort, without spending too much.

Most marketers would run several campaigns at a time and then monitor which are the ones worth continuing and stop those which don’t show much promise.

My Experience

It’s always so much easier to receive ‘Likes’ or ‘Comments’ in your campaigns. But we all know that Likes and Comments don’t necesaarily translate to sales.

It’s how relatable your T-shirt is to the audience that would push them to buy. T-shirt selling platforms like Teespring would print only if you have at least five orders.

4. Testing and Tweaking

It’s recommended that you run your campaigns for at least 24 hours before you decide the winners or losers. Some campaigns may have a lot of engagement but not real sales. This might show audience’s interest so you might want to run it for 2-3 days before deciding if it’s worth pursuing.

Conclusion

Selling T-shirts online, I would say, is a ‘straightforward’ business, in the sense that it is relatively easy to execute. However, it does require some investment, particularly if you are using FB as a marketing tool. Like any other business, success hardly comes overnight and it takes patience with trials and errors on the niches and designs.

You might want to run campaigns with few different niches or have different designs on the same niche.

Some T-shirt marketers may boast profits of thousands of dollars on just one design. But don’t be fooled because hardly are they ever forthright about the amount of money that they put into their ads!

If you have any experience or thoughts on selling T-shirts as an online business, feel free to leave your comments below. Who knows, somewhere, someone would benefit from what you have to say. Thank you!

About The Author

Zailinah

I was a serial online product buyer till I found success in affiliate marketing. I created About Online Business to share my experience. As you are well aware, success is no walk in the park. But perseverance pays. Your opinion is important to me so feel free to share your thoughts. Our views may differ but that does not mean we can't learn from each other. Go ahead, leave me your thoughts below:)

What a neat idea for personal/business branding, and a great way to add more sales. I was curious about how to do this.
Do these platforms have widgets to add on your existing site? Or the ability to build a “branded store” that can be integrated into WordPress?
Thank you.

Thanks! Most marketers whom I learn T-shirt selling from use Facebook as their marketing tool, by creating FB pages. They create FB pages which are generic to T-shirt selling or those which are specific such as targeting people who are Labrador owners, bakers, etc. I’ve not come across of marketers who create websites specifically for T-shirt selling. But I don’t see anything wrong with creating say, e-commerce site for all your T-shirts. Or say you have a cat-grooming website, you can always include a T-shirt promotion as part of your side bar, related to cats, of course. Hope that helps!

I love this article. I always wondered how those ads came about. I have purchased a t-shirt and hoodie from two different designs on Facebook. In truth the hoodie is my favorite garment to wear. I am going to have to think about or investigate this option as an addition to my business.
Thanks so much for sharing.

Selling T-shirts seems like a lot of fun. I think the most fun is designing the shirt. I can play with words, fonts, colors and pictures.
It’s a good way to start a business if you have a bit to invest. I actually researched a bit about it and honestly, I would love to do it in the future after I finish school.
It makes me so exited just thinking about it.

Hey Erika,
Go for it! If you have money to put in for marketing and you love designing, you can always start on T-shirt selling. In this business, it’s the marketing part that’s more challenging and it takes patience really before you make that hit – the profitable design. FYI, there are some software that helps to make the design part easier.

Hi John,
Well, it’s not ‘odd’ at all if you look at the successes some marketers receive. Some made five-figure sums just n one design alone. But of course, if you put in peanuts in your FB marketing, you might not reap much. Anyway, good luck should you decide to try!

This selling your t-shirt online business sounds interesting.
I had t-shirts advertised on my FB page and have actually clicked on it. The t-shirt itself was $25 which I thought was a bit too expensive. Especially when I don’t know the quality of it.

I can see how targeting a specific niche could really do well. The only question is the cost of the marketing campaign. The investment in marketing can be limited, and would seem wise to do. How long did you do the t-shirt business and was it successful for you? In terms of profit, what was your return on investment?

Hi Dinh,
Let me be honest. T-shirt selling is easy to start but the rewards are hardly immediate. Personally, I went through more than 10 designs in several niches before I saw the first success. Out of 10 campaigns, usually 3 are worth going ahead with. That’s why in my post, I explained that usually I put up more than 1 campaign and monitor the progress – then go ahead with the winners and kill the losers.

Although it’s fun creating the designs, it can be a gamble as to which design sells. So if you want to get into it, start small (setting daily budget) and expand if you make progress with certain designs.

So do you think selecting a niche would probably be easier AFTER doing the searches in Facebook? Then start the designing?

Thanks for the tip about avoiding using copyright material. What’s the easiest way to confirm they are NOT copyrighted?

It looks a bit complex setting up a campaign, any tips on how to best start out doing that? And what do you think is a reasonable budget to start out with? Obviously as sales grow, so can the campaigns!

In my opinion, you can do niche research anyway you want. The key is to identify a ‘generic’ niche first, for instance in my example of cats. Many people have cats as pets. But I could narrow it doen to Persian cats. And taking your suggestion in using FB in my niche research, I could search if there ARE FB groups of Persian cat owners or lovers. Then I can proceed with the T-shirt design.

As for copyright issues, certainly you want to avoid brand names, and images that may have association with companies’ logos. Frankly the best way to check is using Google. This is how I found that I can’t use the word ‘Zumba’ on my T-shirts.

Contrary to what you believe, Roger, setting up FB campaigns is not complicated at all. To me, it is choosing targeted, relevant audience that’s more challenging, because this would make or break your campaigns. In this post, I briefly talk about setting up FB ads among other means of getting traffic. Since you bring this topic up, I may do a post on setting up FB campaigns in the future:)

Having and generating income from an online business requires diversification. I believe diversification can be good because then you could assess which ones work for you and which ones don’t really. Scale up those which generate consistent income and try to improve or abandon (if they’re not profitable) those which are not.